A Surprising Statistic About The Long-Term Unemployed

Pew is out with a new study (.pdf) about the long-term unemployed in America.

The long-tern unemployed are people who have been unemployed at least a year, and as you can see (and as you should know by know), the scale of the problem these days is way bigger than it has been during any other period over the last half a century.

Click the chart to enlarge.

What’s interesting is that the population that makes up the long-term unemployed is very different than the unemployed population as a whole.

Check out this breakdown of the unemployed and long-term unemployed by level of education.

Those who have just a high-school diploma, or less than a high-school diploma are vastly over-represented among the unemployed (the red bar) but among the long-term unemployed (the blue bars), they’re rather under-represented. In fact, the Less Than High-School category is the lowest among the long-term unemployed.

The answer to that can be explained by this chart, probably, which shows the age of the long-term unemployed.

Those who are 55+ overwhelm this category, as it’s well-known that finding a new job at that age is a brutal experience.

So long-term unemployment is structurally different than unemployment. All the stats are flipped, and those who are the most shut out of the labour force generally are not necessarily those who will be shut out for the longest amount of time.